James Nuechterlein

You get to a certain age and you know-or ought to know-what you think about important issues. Open-mindedness, when understood as a willingness to change one’s mind if presented with new information or deeper insight, is a considerable virtue. But open-mindedness understood as perpetual . . . . Continue Reading »

In this month’s While We’re At It, RJN makes passing reference to Christopher Caldwell’s astute article in the Weekly Standard on book reviewing practices at the New York Times Book Review (“The Reviewers Reviewed: Literary Boosterism in the New York Times ,” October 27, 1997). The NYTBR . . . . Continue Reading »

The first duty of the historian, I used to tell my students, is to understand the past on its own terms. It should be obvious that good history requires an empathetic imagination: the ability to get inside the minds of those of other times and other places and see the world as they saw it. One may . . . . Continue Reading »

It was the issue of abortion that taught me to be suspicious of the word “reform.” It was the early 1960s and all right-minded people were in favor of “abortion reform.” I assumed I should be too until it gradually dawned on me, slow learner that I was, that people speaking of abortion . . . . Continue Reading »

Politics in the West has in recent years lost much of its ideological edge. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 has had a continuing ripple effect on political developments elsewhere. Progressives of all stripes have watched with dismay—and a deep sense of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In his wise and engaging essay elsewhere in this issue (“I Do?”, p. 14), David Blankenhorn expresses puzzled dismay over the alacrity with which the clergy have participated in the contemporary trivializing of the marriage vow. “I do not understand,” he says, “why the clergy, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Of the various disasters that littered the 1960s, none was more deleterious in its effects than the series of black riots that began in Birmingham in 1963 and became an annual rite of summer for most of the rest of the decade. The best-remembered of them occurred in Watts in 1965, but the two most . . . . Continue Reading »

It was quite by chance that I found myself in Canada on June 2, federal election day. It turned out to be an election that satisfied no one, and that may indeed mark one further step on the road to national dissolution. The ruling Liberal Party maintained its majority in the 301-seat Parliament, but . . . . Continue Reading »

April was a month crowded with events in America’s continuing muddled encounter with the dilemmas of race. To begin with, as every sentient citizen of the Republic must by now be aware, April 15 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers to end . . . . Continue Reading »

Elsewhere in this issue (“Catholics in Exile,” p. 9) Leonard R. Klein responds to my January column, “In Defense of Sectarian Catholicity.” He does not disagree with my argument that catholic orthodoxy can exist in places outside the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions (though he has some . . . . Continue Reading »